Richard Dimick Jenks
Memorial Prize
Origins and Administration

In September, 2003, before his death in December, Dick talked to several
persons in the computer algebra community
about his desire to
establish a prize in software engineering as applied to computer algebra.
The prize was to be started with the residual funds from the Computers and
Mathematics conferences that he and David Chudnovsky had organized.
He discussed a number of his ideas with us in broad terms, but he became
incapacitated before all the details could be worked out. We thus carried on
trying to do what we thought he wanted. The only directive we did not
follow was, "Do not name the prize for me."

The funds from Computers and Mathematics were transferred to a bank account
that was set up for the prize endowment at the Wilmington Trust Company in
Wilmington, Delaware. After Dick's death a number of friends and
organizations contributed additional funds to the prize fund. With the
listing of their names here, we hereby gratefully acknowledge their support.

The fund, as of September 28, 2004, has a balance of US$27,256.29 after the
awarding of the prize for 2004. This is not enough to continue the prize
indefinitely. At today's low interest rates, the fund needs approximately
US$10,000 additional to be self sustaining.

To date the prize has been administered by an ad-hoc committee consisting
of Manuel Bronstein (until his sad, untimely death in 2005; he was replaced
by David Musser in 2006), Bob Caviness,
James Davenport, Patrizia Gianni, and Barry Trager. It is anticipated
that in the near future, the prize funds and administration will be
transferred to a professional organization (as of Summer 2006 the prize is
officially the ACM SIGSAM Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize and will be
administered by ACM SIGSAM).
With this change, it is
hoped that additional contributions will be made to the prize fund so
that it can become financially self sustaining. Additional contributions
via ACM will now be deductible for US tax purposes.

Many thanks to William Sit and Erich Kaltofen for helpful suggestions for
improvement of this web site.